Bestsellers - Nonfiction

Bestselling Nonfiction from a variety of sources including the New York Times.

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In this book. Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style--a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage--Coates provides readers an illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here.

The standup comedian teams up with a New York University sociologist to explore the nature of modern relationships, evaluating how technology is shaping contemporary relationships and considering the differences between courtships of the past and present.

A former girlfriend of Hugh Hefner describes how her years inside the Playboy Mansion went from a fairytale of A-list celebrity parties to an oppressive regime of strict rules, scheduled sex, and a total loss of identity, so much so that she even contemplated suicide.

President "Carter tells what he is proud of and what he might do differently. He discusses his regret at losing his re-election, but how he and Rosalynn pushed on and made a new life and second and third rewarding careers. He is frank about the presidents who have succeeded him, world leaders, and his passions for the causes he cares most about, particularly the condition of women and the deprived people of the developing world.

Before his name became synonymous with a new style of comedy; before he had written, directed, or produced his first movie or TV show; before he and his roommate Adam Sandler were performing stand up at dive bars in LA; before all that, Judd Apatow was a kid in Syosset, Long Island who was utterly obsessed with comedy. At 16, he started hosting a radio show for his local high school station, and he would call up the biggest comics of the day--comics like Jerry Seinfeld, Jay Leno, Steve Allen, Sandra Bernhard; none of whom, by the way, had any idea they were talking to a kid in his parents' garage--and talk to them about what got them into comedy, and what made them stay in. Thirty years later, Apatow is still that comedy nerd, and still interviewing comics about what drives them and why they do what they do. That obsession has made him one of the most recognizable and influential comedic filmmakers working today. This book is a collection of 30 years worth of conversations--always funny, often poignant, and incredibly intimate--that not only span Apatow's career, but his adult life. Featuring interviews with luminaries like Mel Brooks and Chris Rock and modern icons like Louis CK and Amy Schumer, this is a book for fans of comedy, from the nerdiest fan of all.

David Brooks focuses on the values that should inform our lives. Responding to what he calls the culture of the Big Me, which emphasizes external success, he challenges us, and himself, to rebalance the scales between our "resume virtues"-- achieving wealth, fame, and status-- and our "eulogy virtues," those that exist at the core of our being: kindness, bravery, honesty, or faithfulness, focusing on what kind of relationships we have formed. Looking to some of the world's greatest thinkers and inspiring leaders, the author explores how, through internal struggle and a sense of their own limitations, they have built a strong inner character--labor activist Frances Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower, Dorothy Day, civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Blending psychology, politics, spirituality, and confessional, this book provides an opportunity for us to rethink our priorities, and strive to build rich inner lives marked by humility and moral depth.

Joseph Ellis gives us the unexpected story of why the thirteen colonies, having just fought off the imposition of a distant centralized governing power, would decide to subordinate themselves anew. The triumph of the American Revolution was neither an ideological nor political guarantee that the colonies would relinquish their independence and accept the creation of a federal government with power over their individual autonomy. The Quartet is the story of this second American founding and of the men responsible--such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, Robert Morris and Governeur Morris. It was these men who shaped the contours of American history by diagnosing the systemic dysfunctions created by the Articles of Confederation, manipulating the political process to force a calling of the Constitutional Convention, conspiring to set the agenda in Philadelphia, orchestrating the debate in the state ratifying conventions, and, finally, drafting the Bill of Rights to assure state compliance with the constitutional settlement.

Buck's epic account of traveling the length of the Oregon Trail the old-fashioned way-- in a covered wagon with a team of mules, an audacious journey that hasn't been attempted in a century-- tells the rich history of the trail, the people who made the migration, and its significance to the country.

A technology writer follows Musk’s life from his difficult South African childhood to his involvement in Internet start-ups like the rocket company SpaceX, the electric-car company Tesla and the solar power installation company Solar City.

While getting into his car on the evening of February 16, 1978, the chief of the CIA's Moscow station was handed an envelope by an unknown Russian. Its contents stunned the Americans: details of top-secret Soviet research and development in military technology that was totally unknown to the United States. From 1979 to 1985, Adolf Tolkachev, an engineer at a military research center, cracked open the secret Soviet military research establishment, using his access to hand over tens of thousands of pages of material about the latest advances in aviation technology, alerting the Americans to possible developments years in the future. He was one of the most productive and valuable spies ever to work for the United States in the four decades of global confrontation with the Soviet Union. Tolkachev took enormous personal risks, but so did his CIA handlers. Moscow station was a dangerous posting to the KGB's backyard. The CIA had long struggled to recruit and run agents in Moscow, and Tolkachev became a singular breakthrough. With hidden cameras and secret codes, and in face-to-face meetings with CIA case officers in parks and on street corners, Tolkachev and the CIA worked to elude the feared KGB. Drawing on previously secret documents obtained from the CIA, as well as interviews with participants, Hoffman reveals how the depredations of the Soviet state motivated one man to master the craft of spying against his own nation until he was betrayed to the KGB by a disgruntled former CIA trainee. No one has ever told this story before in such detail, and Hoffman's deep knowledge of spycraft, the Cold War, and military technology makes him uniquely qualified to bring readers this real-life espionage thriller.

As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T.H. White's tortured masterpiece, The Goshawk, which describes White's struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. Then she fills the freezer with hawk food and unplugs the phone, ready to embark on the long, strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals.

Michael B. Oren's memoir of his time as Israel's ambassador to the United States--a period of transformative change for America and a time of violent upheaval throughout the Middle East--provides a frank look inside the special relationship between America and its closest ally in the region.